Ephemeral
by 13pens
Summary: Zelena has watched Regina her entire life. Sometimes, that is all she is permitted to do. AU in which Zelena never became the wicked witch, not quite. Vague swan queen at the end, one-shot. WARNING: both shown and referenced non-graphic child abuse


**A/N**: this is just something i put together as my main laptop is sent into repair. it was a great reminder of how much i absolutely do not miss writing in google docs, or on the small laggy screen of an android.

much thanks to amanda and steph for putting up with my babbly bullshit [hearts]

optional soundtrack/inspiration: anything from ghibli tbh

* * *

"Children often have imaginary playmates. I suspect that half of them are really their guardian angels."

– Eileen Elias Freeman

* * *

You are seven years old and you love climbing trees. You love it more than you ever fear falling from one, or being stuck in one.

It is enchanting to you the way you can pull your small body up and up and you don't even need magic. It is you against the sky and only you and you never stop smiling, even when you are trying to figure out how to get from one branch to another and falling is just one miscalculation away.

You sit on a thick branch and wait for the dawn to finish unfolding. You are told to find many things beautiful––gems, dresses, the chatter of dukes and duchesses as they look at you with such praise––but this, this here, every morning, is everything.

(But the sun could never outshine your bright face, even when later mother would command you to open your palms after spotting leaves in your hair, see the sticky indentations, and slap them with her gloved hands. You are brighter than anything she could do to snuff you out.)

And you become so taken with the colors of the sky that particular morning, of the silhouettes of birds flying across that canvas, that you don't notice that the tree had been creaking in protest, and you don't foresee that in a matter of seconds you'd be holding on to the trunk with your whole body.

You're not afraid of falling, no –– but you can't shout or cry for help because then mother would wake and do more than simply smack your hands as you watched them go from brown to pink. You love climbing more than you fear bruises but never more than you fear mother. Your eyes are wet to the brim and your mouth forms a deep, deep frown.

The sound of your stifled cries in the quiet could have ruptured the dead. And it does.

Soon you feel the air around you change; you feel cold, like someone is watching you, and you don't know whose presence you should be expecting. All you know is that the tree is bending slowly, slowly, as if to bow, and you stop breathing until your feet are close enough to the grass to settle yourself down.

Your life has always been littered with tiny, unexplainable things––from when you were just a small bundle of life and the toy that had fallen from your crib was returned to you when no one else was in the room, to this very moment when a tree heard your quiet calls for help and set you down itself.

You gaze up at it as it bends back upright, and it stills like it had never happened. You'll always think it was the tree, when really, there was something far more. Something that mother would never tell you herself, not in this world.

You run back home as fast as your legs would allow and the only thing you climb onto from then on is your horse, Rocinante.

* * *

_"She won't survive," they tell Cora solemnly. She sighs heavily, throat sore and covered in sweat. The baby she holds in her arms takes one labored breath after another and it's apparent that the midwives are right._

_There are tears in Cora's eyes and she holds onto the girl's hand as gently as she had ever held anything else, but she says, she says: "Good. It's for the better."_

_"What would you have named her?" one midwife asks._

_Cora laughs with a kind of bitterness. Her child has not even died yet. "She is approaching a rather green color, is she not? Zelena, perhaps."_

_Zelena inhales one more time, then her bulbous eyes shut for good and her tiny fist stops clenching around Cora's finger._

_"Goodbye, Zelena."_

* * *

Then, when you turn twelve, a boy from the neighboring manor sees mother do magic and calls you the daughter of an evil witch.

Your cheeks are hot with fury, you wish so greatly to hit him, but mother has told you time and time again that a lady never looks for trouble. A lady never fights.

"She's not evil," you say, the good child you are, defending mother when all she does is criticize you, "and she's not a witch!"

"I bet she turns you into a toad when you've been bad. Regina is a toad!" He dances around you, "Regina is a toad!"

You stand with your arms crossed and you let him laugh his way back home. You let him go because it's what a lady does even when she is hurt.

Then you feel it again. The cold. But this time you're not struck with a fearful wonder. When something snags at his ankles and he is waggling midair crying for his father, you laugh. You laugh so hard even though you're never sure what is happening, because surely you don't have magic, and if you had you'd have known.

He lands flat on his bottom and runs very very far from you and your laughter is easily the brightest thing in the world.

–––

But there's been a mistake and a misunderstanding. Mother hears about the incident and she's angry, so very angry, gripping your wrist with such force and demanding to know how you did it.

You cry and cry over again that you didn't do it and she slaps you straight across the face and locks you into your room.

The presence is there again when she leaves and you beg for it to go away. "Please," you say, rupturing the dead once more. But it remains.

You feel the air thicken just about your face, as if someone were holding it in their hands. You close your eyes and let it kiss where mother had hit you. You let it do it over and over, again and again until the sting is gone and your tears are dry.

–––

"Who are you?" you ask when the space around you becomes that welcoming chill again. You are fifteen and brave and full of light. You long to know and you long to love.

Your question gives the presence a voice. You hear it in a whisper against your ear. "Zelena," you repeat. "Your name is Zelena."

The candles in your room light up and you smile. You have no idea how this soul came to be and why it loves you with all its metaphysical being, but you just know that it is and that it does.

Then for a moment, though there is nothing _there_, your eyes look right at it. You look at Zelena. You look at _me_. Your sight gives the soul an _I_.

––

You're having tea with the duke's daughters. They stare at you in a certain way that you can't put your finger on, and they look more like mother than they look like you anyway.

You shift uncomfortably in your seat, like you don't belong in this skin or this dress with such a tight tight bodice. You don't belong with raised pinkies and straightened backs with chins lifted in condescension, or with idle chatter of royal functions or how your harpsichord lessons are getting along. No, you belong in the warmth of humid meadows on the back of a horse, you belong in trees, you belong where you never have to leash your own smile, your own beautiful deep laughter.

"You ought to spend less time in the sun," the eldest daughter says. She is perhaps four years your senior, her hair is the lightest shade of yellow and you always see her walking with a parasol. "I hear it's not healthy."

"A flower cannot grow without a bit of sun, can it?" you say, and deep, deep in your tone is warning, for you know what will happen if they keep on.

"Surely, but too much shall dry it out."

The handle of her teacup slips right out of her gloved fingers and the hot liquid splashes all over her lap and it scalds her.

She squeaks and her sisters titter, giving you permission to do the same, but after all: they simply think she is clumsy, and you know that it was me.

"It seems to me you need drying of your own," you say. She grows red in the face, but as she rises her heel snags on the hem of her dress and she falls. The duke enters with your mother and you cannot tell which is better to you: how humiliated he is upon seeing his foolish daughter or how relieved mother is to know that you will not be the subject of ill talk this time around.

You almost feel sorry for the duke's daughter. But then she glares at you so she trips again and before you fall asleep that night you listen to me tell the story of a beautiful young girl with eyes like a sunset whose spirit was freer than anything else.

––

You are sixteen and beginning to fall in love with the stable boy, whose smile reaches his eyes when he sees you. You show me the flower he gave you––a simple daisy with a deep violet center––and you let me take it around you in a dance before settling it behind your ear and into your dark hair.

Sometimes your soul is bigger than your body. I see it and I have no beginning or ending but you are always bright enough, big enough, to make up the in between.

When your heart settles you sit on the grass and there's a tear in your eye. I feel everything that I am rumble into heaviness.

"Mother doesn't know about him," you say quietly. Your father appears in the distance wondering who you are talking to, and all the while wishing that you could talk to him. "I can't win against her. She has magic."

A thin blow of wind brushes the teardrop away from your face. That wind lingers beneath your ear. You listen, and I tell you something you've always known in your big, beautiful heart.

"True love is magic," you echo, and smile.

––

It rains the day you realize that all things can be lost.

Mother thinks that perhaps you had been learning magic behind her back, and that is why whenever she raises her hand and lifts you, menacing blue about her hands and your body, something is always there to cushion your fall when she flings you down. Whenever she strikes you, there are never any bruises, never any cuts, even when she would have covered them up anyway.

She comes into your room when you're out. Folded up on your bedside table, she finds a piece of paper you'd scrawled my name in –– it was what you had of me, besides instances that no one else could share and that were gone as soon as they were over –– and says the name out loud the way she did when I had died. Her eyes are dark and unforgiving and she crumples it.

She begins an incantation, voice rumbling across particles of corporeality and inexistence. She feels so empty and dark and so unlike you, you who had given me a voice and given me an _I_––you whose soul could give shelter to the lost. I try to go to you but mother finds where I end and pulls.

"You shall no longer interfere," she says, the spell burning at her fingertips, the paper on her feet like a carcass. "You are bound to death and only death. You shall no longer interfere."

The walls rattle in protest but just as in my time of living, I stop.

It rains and rains and you wonder where I am.

––

The next day you meet a young girl, a princess, named Snow White. Her horse had gone wild at mother's hand. The trees would not bend to shift her direction. The wind would not blow at you in warning. There was a trap for your good heart and you couldn't have known.

You feel the air grow cold when the King gets down on a knee but what you're feeling is fear and there is no trace of me, not even the swinging of a framed painting on the wall.

––

The night of Daniel's murder you scream at the walls of your chambers. Your cheeks burn and your arms are shaking before you with stiff fingers clawing where he should have been, as if to show them to me, as if to say: he died in these. I held him and he died.

"Where are you?" you cry. Your voice is like a fist on a door that will not open. "Why weren't you with me? Why didn't you help me?"

You wait and wait but the wicks of your candles refuse to ignite. The force around them is constantly shifting, like a tug of war between this world and yours, but it does nothing. Your sheets do not rustle. The pillow I placed in your arms every time you needed to be held at night does not move.

"You lied to me," you say, and it shatters the dead. "You told me true love was magic and it _wasn't_."

I no longer have a voice. A wind will not meet your ear, will not carry my sorrow. I cannot even kiss your tears away.

––

Snow White finds the crumpled paper in your chest of jewels as you braid her hair. "Who is Zelena?"

You stiffen. "I had an imaginary friend when I was young," you say, even though you are not much older at all. "She doesn't exist."

* * *

_Cora wears a face of pride as she presents a fresh promising life to Xavier's kingdom. Though just an infant she was not fragile. She was not one that would die moments after birth, not one that would struggle even to breathe but instead would be so, so alive._

_"Her name is Regina," Cora says, and it's the only real thing that the lingering soul hears as it welcomes the child with ghostly kisses on the top of her small head. "For one day she will be queen!"_

* * *

_Present day, Storybrooke_

The last thing she thinks of in her sleep is how some things are never truly lost.

Regina is awakened by a light knock on her door at eight in the morning. She was intent on sleeping in today, for what other way to reward one's self for another year of living, but she is quick to change her mind when she sees Henry's big grin behind the door.

"Come in, sweetheart," she says, rubbing her eyes.

Henry enters with a tray. "Emma and I made you a birthday breakfast."

Regina smiles as he places it on the bed. "And where is Emma?"

"Nursing a burn." He rolls his eyes. Regina makes a mental commentary of his likeness to Emma whenever he makes these certain faces. Emma will always argue otherwise––Henry's judgment whenever she fails something like apple pancakes is purely and all Regina.

"Thank you both," Regina laughs, and Henry ducks his head so she can place a kiss on his hair.

"Cora is coming later." It sounds so easy out of his mouth, and Regina is sometimes still surprised that there would ever exist a reality in which those words wouldn't make her feel sick. The heart is the difference, she reminds herself. The heart is the biggest difference.

Regina begins slicing at the pancakes. "How was your day with her yesterday?"

"Really cool, actually, she told me a lot of stories about Wonderland."

She raises an eyebrow, but her smile is unrelenting. "Is that so?"

"She also told me something, ah," he hesitates, and how he can be so little and yet so grown she doesn't know, "that you never talked about before."

"And what was that?"

"She told me about your sister."

"Ah," says Regina, then takes careful sips from the mug of coffee.

"She said you knew her. I thought you could tell me more."

Something stings just a little under Regina's heart. Perhaps she knew her but never really. How does one acquaint itself with which does not really live?

"I think that's a story for another day, mijo," Regina says apologetically, pinches Henry's chubbying face. He winces and they laugh.

"I still need to wash my dishes. Happy birthday, Mom." He kisses her cheek and he takes off downstairs, closing the door enough but not shutting it.

Regina sighs with mirth, uses her fork and knife to examine each pancake underneath the others. When the door calmly swings open again, she doesn't look up.

"It's about time, Emma. I could tell which ones are yours by how burnt they are on the..."

Regina trails off. There is no one there.

She thinks perhaps it is a practical joke, but then something floats through the doorway, light and with ease. It's a daisy, just like the one Daniel had given her a lifetime ago, right down to the shade of purple in its center.

Regina holds out her hand and it lands flat on her palm. She is silent, and the weight of the mere flower feels like the weight of another's hand instead.

She looks up around her empty bedroom. She remembers all sorts of coldness she's felt throughout her life––the ice of loneliness, of anger, of emptiness––but this one, she had almost forgotten. Her quiet mouth forms a bright, bright smile.

"Hey?" Emma says at the doorway. Regina had not even heard her arrive. "Is everything okay?"

"Yeah," Regina says absently, sets the daisy down next to her where Emma can't see. Then she lifts the remainder of her first pancake with her fork, points it to Emma, and says, "But this has far too much cinnamon."

_end_


End file.
